Hacker News: mattbillenstein

New comment by mattbillenstein in "EFF is leaving X"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:02:31 +0000

Pretty interesting to see the drop off in impressions - Twitter/X really is just a megaphone for Musk to deliver his "probably next year" wrt various product releases for the Elon-gelicals who bid up Tesla stock to meme levels.

I really can't imagine the data is even good for training Grok anymore - like if it's such a small subset of neo-nazi supporting folks - how is it even useful?

New comment by mattbillenstein in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

mattbillenstein — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:04:45 +0000

Framework Laptop + some form of Linux - MacOS keeps getting worse and the hardware exceeding hard and expensive to repair.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Time to Dump Windows?"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:41:01 +0000

If I could play GTA6 on Ubuntu at release, I'd probably switch, but as-is, I'll probably stay on Windows 10 indefinitely for gaming.

I've used Kubuntu as a daily driver at work several times - imo it's superior to a mac for development; Apple is so actively hostile to actually running open-source or custom software.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

mattbillenstein — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:43:42 +0000

I don't have it at hand, but if you look at all the products and apis they cut - and then all the users who abandoned it in the first few months, I think that's how this was derived.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:43:18 +0000

He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:40:53 +0000

This is becoming the problem with all of his businesses - Tesla has a crazy valuation and it really seems like they're having huge trouble getting Robotaxi going in Austin given the very slow progress there.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Crypto investor turns $50M into $36,000 in one botched move"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:48:48 +0000

Worked in this space briefly - the footguns in defi are crazy - nobody should use or trust any of this stuff ever.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

mattbillenstein — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:30:18 +0000

Extends to the extreme levels of SaaS-ification of fairly basic app functionality as well.

It's often simpler to build something you know than to integrate a 3rd party service, but it's highly frowned upon by a lot of devs and management.

Auth and analytics are things I'm thinking of - we have good tools to build these in-house. Also just running a database - never seen so many people afraid of installing postgres and a cronjob to back it up.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Layoffs at Block"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:08:25 +0000

Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway. I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Hetzner: Statement on price adjustment as of April first 2026"

mattbillenstein — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:49:33 +0000

Wow, these are large increases - 38%.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 01:02:17 +0000

Maybe, but you're paying through the nose continually for something you could learn to do once - or someone on your team could easily learn with a little time and practice. Like, if this is a tradeoff you want to make, it's fine, but at some point learning that 10% more can halve your hosting costs so it's well worth it.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:54:50 +0000

If you have a database, you still have work to do - optimizing, understanding indexes, etc. Managed services don't solve these problems for you magically and once you do them, just running the db itself isn't such a big deal and it's probably easier to tune for what you want to do.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:52:27 +0000

Depends on how data-heavy the work is. We run a bunch of gpu training jobs on other clouds with the data ending up in S3 - the extra transfer costs wrt what we save on getting the gpus from the cheapest cloud available, it makes a lot of sense.

Also, just availability of these things on AWS has been a real pain - I think every startup got a lot of credits there, so flood of people trying to then use them.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 10:45:39 +0000

Honestly, the way I've seen a lot of cloud done, they need _more_ people to manage that than a sensible private cloud setup.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Time Machine-style backups with rsync (2018)"

mattbillenstein — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 06:33:45 +0000

restic to s3 has been very reliable - haven't tried borg.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"

mattbillenstein — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:27:43 +0000

The key I think with s3 is using it mostly as a blobstore. We put the important metadata we want into postgres so we can quickly select stuff that needs to be updated based on other things being newer. So, we don't need to touch s3 that often if we don't need the actual data.

When we actually need to manipulate or generate something in Python, we download/upload to S3 and wrap it all in a tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() to cleanup the local disk when we're done. If you don't do this, you end up with a bunch of garbage eventually in /tmp/ you need to deal with.

We also have some longer-lived disk caches and using the data in the db and a os.stat() on the file we can easily know if the cache is up to date without hitting s3. And this cache, we can just delete stuff that's old wrt os.stat() to manage the size of it since we can always get it from s3 again if needed in the future.

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Meta cutting ~1500 VR/AR positions to focus on AI"

mattbillenstein — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:34:11 +0000

I wonder if they regret the name change - like don't rename the whole company after a research project because when it fails people are eventually going to be like 'wtf is a meta?'

New comment by mattbillenstein in "My one-liner Linux Dropbox client"

mattbillenstein — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 04:09:45 +0000

Try syncthing

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo"

mattbillenstein — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 02:30:47 +0000

Why bother with the rebase if you squash anyway? That history just gets destroyed?

New comment by mattbillenstein in "Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo"

mattbillenstein — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:33:49 +0000

This - even 5 devs.

Also rebasing is just so fraught with potential errors - every month or two, the devs who were rebasing would screw up some feature branch that they had work on they needed and would look to me to fix it for some reason. Such a time sink for so little benefit.

I eventually banned rebasing, force pushes, and mandated squash merges to main - and we magically stopped having any of these problems.